The concept of the dual-screen laptop is something we’ve been hearing a lot of speculation about lately, and over at Computex 2018, Asus has taken the bull by the dual-horns with the revelation of Project Precog.
This is a dual-screen hybrid notebook, and as Windows Central reports, it’s a concept device at this stage, with Asus planning to launch the machine in 2019.
It’s named Project Precog because Asus is apparently using AI tech to detect exactly what you’ll need from the machine. So the second display (which substitutes for the traditional keyboard base) can offer a virtual keyboard – alongside other elements like, for example, small chat or video windows – with the AI technology using proximity sensing to detect your hands and place the keyboard where you need it.
Plug an actual physical keyboard and mouse into the machine, however, and it’ll intelligently detect this and get rid of the virtual keyboard, giving you more display real-estate to use for other purposes.
There are further potential applications too – like standing the device up with both screens in portrait mode, and using it in that configuration with an external keyboard.
So the overall idea is a very flexible hybrid notebook that adapts to exactly what you need for any particular use case, and it does so automatically thanks to the aforementioned AI tech.
Grand vision
In theory, that’s an impressively grand vision, and Project Precog could be something special. Of course, it’s still early days, and Asus wasn’t letting folks explore or play with the device at Computex – so we have to temper our expectations at this point, in terms of how much of this may be so much fuel for the hype train, as it were.
However, there’s certainly a growing level of interest in the possibility of a dual-screen laptop, with Microsoft rumored to have been looking into this for some time now (indeed the company mulled similar concepts way back in the past). And just last week we heard speculation about a Dell dual-screen ARM-driven notebook.
Of course, we already have hardware like the Lenovo Yoga Book on the market, which offers a novel digital keyboard that can transform into a virtual sketchpad you can use a stylus with, for drawing or jotting notes.
But these dual-screen machines want to take things a lot further than this.
